The Joni Mitchell - Best Album POLL

xposts:"ended up voting for blue and predict a massive "silent majority" effect in these poll results""I'm struggling here with why anyone would vote for anything other than Blue"

"Spent many many hours listening to Blue and Court & Spark way back when. The voice, music and the half-tone slightly mysterious photos of Joni on those 2 albums - that was an awesome combo when I was 14 or so. Voted Blue, that was the first one."

agreeeed! in addition to Blue and Court and Spark, For the Roses always hit close to home, and either could be the top pick on any given day. Hejira then Hissing... round out me pee-oh-vee.

Feel like a total asshole for voting Miles of Aisles but there is no better combination of her songs on record!!! Don't hate me ILM, esp. if you include RAD live albums on career retrospective polls!!!

Blue is really a very time/place/emotion specific record. It's really hard to listen to large parts of it if I'm in a very specific frame of mind (generally full-blown depression, anxiety, etc). C&S can really come on at any time, though.

The version of "Both Sides Now" on Joni's (otherwise) covers album with the same name from oh maybe five/ten years ago is pretty amazing. I dunno if there's ever been a song written by someone when they're young that is better suited to a wistful wizened "cover" by the same artist 30+ years on. It simply drips resonance.

My mother, who is not a music snob, became fascinated with that 2000 version of "Both Sides Now" after hearing it in Love Actually; she would play it over and over again, deeply moved. I'm pretty fond of it myself – the best use of Joni's nicotine-scarred pipes.

I'll rep for Night Ride Home any day - I get the feeling most hardcore Joni fans will too - the songs are almost all great, the production serves her deepened voice, the groove is really pleasant & great; the album's well-titled in that regard.

Been listening to Night Ride Home a lot - strikes me as an almost archetypal late-career autumnal album, recalling what you love about the artist's earlier work but with a sepia-toned faded elegance. Love the gentle, warm, 80s-into-90s production and the evocation of Hejira's loping jazz feel - esp. on the title track, "Passion Play", "Cherokee Louise", "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "Nothing Can Be Done". Not sure how I feel about the recurrent use of vocal vamps on some of the other tracks; Joni always seems to run into trouble when she tries to borrow soul motifs.

I don't have it any more but my memory of Turbulent Indigo was of it being much less pretty than this and much more didactic.

Yes - I went through a period of obsession with Night Ride Home when I got into it. To me one thing about it is that while there's a great range to the songs - some more uptempo, some loping, some lighter & some darker - the overall tone, the shading I guess or coloration?, seems really consistent to me. This single dark and rich tone dominates - to me it's a dense blue-grey maybe. I know of few records better suited to headphones in the middle of the night.

i haven't listened to it for ages. of course i haven't got here in berlin (i have moved). if my memory serves me well i preferred it to the one before, which was dull. but i think i liked "turbulent indigo", the one after better. i should definitely rip my vinyl albums asap to find out.

I know of few records better suited to headphones in the middle of the night.

Yes. I just bought some new headphones and just walking home on a wintry night (lol southern hemisphere) is perfect for this.

How does it figure in terms of producton as a sticking point, I haven't heard it really since it's release and have a hard time finding a way through the other eigties albums mainly for that reason.

Bits of the 80s inhere: there's some subtle tribal (or quasi-tribal) percussion on some tracks ("Slouching Towards Bethlehem"; "Nothing Can Be Done"), like a really quiet adult-contemporary version of The Commodores' "Night Shift" or Fleetwood Mac's "Caroline" - but much softer and warmer (which I think is as much a sign of the broader swing towards naturalism generally as the 80s turned into the 90s as a conscious decision) - but mostly the sound is built on spacey guitar, ghostly insubstantial keyboards and some jazz horns - very much what you'd expect Hejira to sound like if produced in 1991 rather than 1976.

But at any rate although it sounds like a 1991 record, it's very much a not the kind of record where the production overpowers the songwriting or singing - my word for all of it would be "sympathetic". The songs I like a bit less ("The Windfall", "Ray's Dad's Cadillac" - and this is relative) are more because of the vocals or the lyrics than the productions/arrangements.

I thought "Come In From The Cold" was too reliant on its chorus at first, but it's one of those tunes that seems (oddly) less tuneful the more you listen to it, and more exploratory and just... Is there a single word to describe that sense you get from some songs where subtle reiterations and shifts build on themselves to create a sense of... not intensity, but rather of sweep, like watching a person's face change through timelapse photography (actually this is almost the subject matter of the song so maybe that's not so odd). It's got that same sense of a sweep through a person's life and emotional landscape that makes "Amelia" and "Hejira" and "Song For Sharon" and "Refuge of the Roads" - this kind of thing feels perhaps uniquely Joni to me.

Those really amorphous, gauzy 1991 keyboards actually work so well for this, the way they seem to echo and shimmer around Joni's guitar to create a vibe of emotional waxing and waning, a subtle accenting more affecting for its lack of solidity.

I'm the opposite I guess in that I used to have Turbulent Indigo like 15 years ago but never took to it much - stuff like "Sex Kills" and "Not Too Blame" were too didactic and embittered, too much like Joni in interviews. On Night Ride Home the early stages of the nicotine thickening of her voice gives it this fabulous sense of regret and persistence through sorrow, but with none of that bitterness, it's a really gentle portrayal of middle-aged wisdom. Even "Cherokee Louise", which you'd expect to be kind of browbeating, is so evocative and empathetic. That bit where she sings "... I know where she is..." gives me chills.

her politics are pretty simpleminded on those late records; she's casting aspersions all over the place. it's tiresome, even when the music is occasionally seductive. although it's pretty obvious her melodic facility nearly dried up some time around 1979.

So the whole time I've been in New York I've had "Song For Sharon" in my head on and off (though haven't actually listened to it). Only Joni could so deeply and indelibly imprint herself in my brain that I can be standing on a subway platform and suddenly think, "A woman I knew just drowned herself / the well was deep and muddy / she was just shaking off futility / or punishing somebody / my friends were calling up all day yesterday / all emotions and abstraction / it seems we all live so close to that line, and / so far from satisfaction..."